


The Power of Place

by Scribe



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:55:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scribe/pseuds/Scribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for <a href="http://slashfairy.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://slashfairy.livejournal.com/"><b>slashfairy</b></a>, who asked for Viggo and Central America. Since I don't know much about Viggo, I decided to put him in Guatemala, which I do know a little bit about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Power of Place

It's hard to say what draws Viggo back to Guatemala year after year. It is certainly an incredible country, rainforest and ruins and a jagged, awesome skyline of volcanoes everywhere you look. He is fascinated by the native culture. The country struggles, too, with poverty and starvation and violence and underneath it all is a desperate need for change that sparks an answering fire within him, as it always has.

Above all that, though, is the challenge that brings him back again and again- the Guatemalan highlands are the one place in the world that he simply cannot photograph. He tries endlessly, undiscouraged, because that is what he knows how to do. It is the most beautiful place he's ever been. He loves the dramatic sweep of green mountains, the sudden vistas, the sunrise over hilltop fields of corn. He especially loves being above and beside and in the clouds, seeing them cling to the road ahead of him and feeling them on his face.

None of it will be captured with his camera. The mountains are dwarfed and nondescript; the clouds dismal gray. Instead, he paints the history of the hills- red for the blood, black for corruption, navy for the tears and the children and the death.

In Guatemala, Viggo thinks in a bizarre mixture of languages, but he dreams in Spanish. Often he dreams of an old guatemalteco man with brown skin and laugh lines and small, calloused hands- the old man he wants to be. He wants to eke his survival out of an impossibly tilted mountainside farm. That way when the time comes he could die by losing his footing and literally falling off the face of the earth, tumbling down and down into some secret valley that no one will ever see.

 

Dom visits every few years, usually unexpectedly and usually for a few months at a time. It isn't hard to see why he comes to Viggo and not Billy. Viggo is loving and understanding and easy and strong; Billy is all these things, but also married. Viggo doesn't mind. He loves Dom like he loves the land: loves that one day Dom seems to be nothing more or less than a younger, edgier version of himself, loves that the next day he is farther from the realm of Viggo's experience than the stars, loves especially that he feels in some small way the same pull of the highlands.

Dom's Spanish grammar is atrocious. It makes Viggo laugh with delight to listen to him chattering away in a halting, hybrid British-Hispanic accent. What's more, he provides an interruption in Viggo's fruitless quest. Most of the time he laughs at Viggo's attempts, steals the camera, and takes unrepentantly touristy pictures of them both posed in front of whatever landscape Viggo has been trying to capture. The scenery doesn't come out any better for Dom. Viggo keeps the pictures anyway, for the sake of the two of them grinning in the foreground.

Dom escapes to Guatemala after his mother's death, to mourn and to get away from mourning. By that time Viggo is routinely spending the better part of his year haunting the highlands. He doesn't settle anywhere in particular because he wants the whole country to be home, not just a house, so it takes several phone calls and even more hours to track him down. He realizes on his way that this is probably only the second thing in Dom's life that he has preferred to talk to Viggo about. It's clear that he doesn't want Billy to have anything to do with it. Viggo wonders which one of them that decision was intended to protect.

Soon enough, they are heading into the mountains, climbing steep hairpin turns past Mayan children carrying their weight in firewood or selling cheap trinkets at roadside stands. They spend almost a week at the top. Viggo watches Dom discover something he's known for a long time. It's what drew him here- the power of the wild, awe-inspiring vistas to multiply pain a thousand fold, and to eclipse it. Catharsis.

They stare out over the top of the world for hours at a time. As Dom finds his peace, Viggo finds his answer. It comes from capturing tiny bits of Dom- profiles, angles, shadows- along with the scenery. A suddenly motherless son with the backdrop of a breathtaking sweep of mountains. A man who stands like the personification of life itself with the backdrop of a world of civil war and starvation. Grief against beauty, beauty against grief.


End file.
